Technical Field
The present invention relates to a liquid discharge apparatus and a method of discharging a liquid.
Related Art
An inkjet printer is known, with which ink is discharged onto a print medium from a plurality of nozzles provided to a print head. With the inkjet printer, actuators element provided so as to correspond to each of the nozzles of the print head are driven in conformity with a drive signal supplied from a drive circuit, and the ink is thereby discharged from the nozzles.
Because a capacitive element, such as a piezo element, is utilized as the actuator elements of the print head, driving the actuator elements requires an ample supply of electrical current. For this reason, the inkjet printer of such description is provided with a current amplifier circuit for amplifying the current of the drive signal. Known as such a current amplifier circuit are: a linear amplifier circuit, such as a class AB amplifier circuit, with which an input signal is amplified by an amplification element without alteration; and a non-linear amplifier circuit, such as a class D amplifier circuit, with which pulse width modulation or pulse density modulation are applied to amplify the current with a switching circuit. In general, a non-linear amplifier circuit has an advantage over a linear amplifier circuit in that less power is consumed. For example, see Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication 2009-123456, Japanese laid-open patent publication 2009-190287 and Japanese laid-open patent publication 2010-114711.